Interview with M.A. Blanchard

M.A. Blanchard’s fiction has appeared in Prairie Fire, Uncharted, Dark Matter Magazine, and PseudoPod. A linguist by training and a surrealist by inclination, she lives on an organic vegetable farm in Mi’kma’ki. When not planting seeds, pulling weeds, or making up stories, she curates #sfstoryoftheday on Twitter and reviews short speculative fiction for Fusion Fragment. Find her on social media @inquisitrix or on the web at www.mablanchard.com.

Manahil: This is Canthius’ tenth issue, and the first for which we have a guest editor, Sanna Wani. Whether you’ve been a long-time reader of Canthius or are just getting introduced us, how did you come to decide what pieces you wanted to share with the magazine?

M.A.: I enjoy Canthius for the eclectic mix of work I’ve encountered in previous issues, so I wanted to submit something a little strange. This story is a personal favourite in my body of work to date, but I’d had trouble finding it the right home due to it being a little too strange for some literary journals and not overtly fantastic enough for speculative magazines. It’s in the second person, too, which can be a hard sell for fiction in any genre. How pleasing to place one of my pet stories in a journal for which I have a particular fondness as a reader!

Manahil: I find writing often emerges from a conversation. What conversation is happening in your work?

M.A.: I realized this spring that nearly everything I’ve been writing over the past few years is fundamentally concerned with exploring the spaces between poles of connection and alienation. “Amanita muscaria” is one of the stories where that exploration steers much closer to the pole of connection, though the bond its characters form is very much rooted in the alienated states of their separate lives prior to meeting.

Manahil: I love how the forest watches in your story. What else does it see and witness? What other secrets is the forest privy to?

M.A.: I think this is an interesting question both in and outside the world of this story, and I think the best answer I can give consists of more questions. What do we project when we walk into a forest? What is it about the forest and the rest of the more-than-human world that can make us feel seen or witnessed even when nothing human feels close to where we’re at? What are the secrets that we feel are revealed to our surroundings even when we are actively trying to remain hidden?

Manahil: What is something you’re working on that you’d like to share!

M.A.: My current major project is a short story collection woven of the threads I’ve been spinning out from those central themes of connection and alienation. “Amanita muscaria” is the third of the stories from the collection to be published, following my story “Corvus conjurax” (in Prairie Fire) and the title story “The Bleak Communion of Abandoned Things” (in PseudoPod), and I’ll have a fourth out early next year in another Canadian literary journal. This is the first time I’ve tried to write a book with the hope of getting it published; it’s invaluably encouraging at this stage to receive some confirmation that at least a few of its individual pieces speak to some of the people who’ve had a chance to read them.

Manahil: In closing, what is a poem, story, painting, chapbook, or book you would like to recommend others read?

M.A.: I just read and loved Rebecca Campbell’s new novella Arboreality. I have a soft spot for both resilience-focused climate fiction and novel(la)s built from linked short stories; the way Campbell combines those attractions with exceptionally lovely prose guarantees I’ll be recommending this book to absolutely everyone.