Catherynne M. Valente is the internationally bestselling author of over forty works of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror, including Space Opera, Fairyland, Deathless, Palimpsest, and Comfort Me With Apples. She is the winner of the Hugo, Nebula, Otherwise, Lambda, Locus, and Sturgeon Awards, among others. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with her child and several unsettlingly clever animals. “When He Calls Your Name” is her seventh appearance in Uncanny, a poignant story of relationships through the lens of a familiar song, in a world with vampires.

Uncanny Magazine: This is an emotionally powerful story with a strong voice and a vivid setting. Which elements did you need to know before you started? What did you discover as you were writing?

Catherynne M. Valente: I started out just wanting to make a vampire story out of “Jolene,” a song so many of us love and have loved for so long, that’s been rewritten and covered every which way. And honestly, I’ve been amusing myself telling people it’s actually about a vampire for years. Please don’t take my man/Please don’t take him just because you can…come ON! Nothing in the original doesn’t work if Jolene is a vampire, it’s perfect. It was always there for me, maybe because I couldn’t really imagine someone being able to take a man from Dolly Parton without some kind of supernatural power.

But then you have to actually write the story, and ha ha it’s a vampire get it isn’t actually going to cut it. So I had to consider what I wanted the emotional situation of the narrator to be, the state of her marriage, and her feelings toward Jolene herself. Because the singer describes Jolene so lovingly, so vividly, and…never mentions one specific trait of her man other than that he is her man. I’m hardly the first to notice that, and the faint whisper of a lesbian reading to the lyrics has been part of the popularity of the song, conscious or unconscious, and especially among the queer community. So I wanted to honor that and bring it forward a bit, which meant finding a way for these two women to challenge each other and seduce each other at the same time, but that very much came in the writing rather than the planning. Gotta let the girls talk! The implication of sexual attraction, even explicitly queer sexual attraction, is bundled into the whole vampire mythos—so, far from being a simple joke, the two narratives pair up at several points.

Uncanny Magazine: What research did you do for this story? Did you learn anything that surprised you?

Catherynne M. Valente: The trouble with setting out to write a vampire story…is now you have to write another goddamned vampire story. And it’s ALL been done. We as a culture have sucked that thing dry, so to speak. So I went back to the well and read every version of how to become a vampire, how to kill one, what they can and can’t do, all of it, looking for something I hadn’t seen before.

The thing about dying alone and unseen leading to becoming a vampire comes from Romani, Greek, and Hebrew folklore, and it seemed so sad and strange, it perfectly fit the aching loneliness in the song and also the slightly less-arch-Dracula version I was going for. Especially since many of those kinds of vampires are explicitly aristocratic, and this is the story of two lowish-middle class women.

But in the end, you’re not going to do a lot of new fancy worldbuilding with a vampire in a short story where you’re also retelling “Jolene.” I’m genuinely delighted with where I ended up—taking the standard, even cliché beliefs like needing an invitation, not being able to eat or drink human food, sunlight, invulnerability, and rather than working from there to figure out a twist, working backwards to imagine the reasons people would’ve started believing those things in the first place. Focusing on why those things could be true of vampires, the origin point from which the tall tales sprang, was fascinating and fruitful. Vampires come from the things we’re ashamed of or afraid of: sex, death, outsiders, corruption, body fluids—and often simply women existing outside the structures built to contain them.

Uncanny Magazine: I loved the setting of this, and particularly the description of the porch as another world, a sort of liminal space. What are some of your favorite fictional places, in any media?

Catherynne M. Valente: I’ve always been fascinated with underworlds, both good and bad, lands of darkness and lands of plenty: Hades and the Big Rock Candy Mountain. Narnia will never not be a favorite, nor Oz. The solar system of Robinson’s 2312, Fantastica from the Neverending Story, the house in Gormenghast, and somehow, the strange world of the animated series Over the Garden Wall always fills me with that peculiar pang of homesickness for a place that doesn’t exist. One of my favorite feelings there is probably a word for in German, but not English.

Uncanny Magazine: This is a story with clear ties to a song—is music a common source of inspiration for you? Do you listen to music while you write?

Catherynne M. Valente: Music is everything, and I definitely find it inspiring, but I can’t write while listening to anything with lyrics; my brain gets all jangled. But I do listen to all sorts of instrumental or otherwise wordless music while I work.

Uncanny Magazine: Who are some of your literary influences? What is something you’ve read recently and loved?

Catherynne M. Valente: I’m reading The Way Home by Peter S. Beagle for myself at the moment, and reading The Neverending Story to my child—both are just endless joy.

Peter is certainly a huge influence on my work, and honestly I could fill the rest of the page with other names, so I’ll just type really fast and force myself to stop quickly: Umberto Eco, Dorothy Parker, Becky Chambers, Kelly Barnhill, Kim Stanley Robinson, Ted Chiang, Kij Johnson, Helen Oyeyemi, Kurt Vonnegut…I’m stopping, I’m stopping…

Uncanny Magazine: What are you working on next?

Catherynne M. Valente: I have a short story set in the world of Stephen King’s The Stand (another massive influence, and I was so honored to get to do it) in The End of the World as We Know It anthology in August, and I’m finishing up a new near-future gender dystopia thriller for Tor called Nobody But Us this summer.

Uncanny Magazine: Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us!

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